On planet Xarbia, an experimental life form, Subject 20, has been created by an elite group of researchers in hopes of preventing a galactic food crisis. However, when Subject 20 becomes deadly, the best troubleshooter in the Galaxy is called in to investigate.

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Review:

FORBIDDEN WORLD is quite simply a brilliantly stupid, enjoyable little movie. Almost perfect: It has space ships, laser battles, a cool drooling grinning skulled alien, abundant gratuitous female nudity, an excellent early electronica musical score, buckets of gore, slimy alien killings, voyeurism, stuff exploding, girls sunbathing naked in space, is over quickly (77 minutes: perfect for limited attention spans) and the hero is actually the movie's brilliant dork character, whom the surviving female hottie (Dawn Dunlap, who gets naked a lot in her movies) was secretly really in love with all the time. That's because he was smart, and smart is sexy. So like in fellow Geekanoid Sci-Fi/horror hybrids as CHOPPING MALL and HARDWARE, the manbeef lead actor (Jesse Vint, who looks familiar ...) is just a distraction for the popcorn crunchers. The real movie is about the geek and how he beats this transmogrifying alien mass of goo and teeth.

Also known as MUTANT, director Allan Holzman's FORBIDDEN WORLD is of course the 3rd of the Big Three Alien Sleaze Epics from the very early 1980's which exploited the ideas Dan O'Bannon and Ridley Scott cooked up for ALIEN. All three were released in the US by Roger Corman's New World Films and make a sort of unofficial Trio -- The first was Norman "Warm & Fuzzy" Warren's deceptively cheesy looking HORROR PLANET (or INSEMINOID) in 1980, then Bob Clark's GALAXY OF TERROR (or MIND WARP: AN INFINITY OF TERROR) in 1981, then Holzman's FORBIDDEN WORLD in 1982. The films helped fill a void created by the sensational effect of ALIEN and the natural desire to try and make more of it for less. All three had very low production budgets but stand as remarkable & effective little shockers with allegorical references to alien outsiders who want to kill our men and mate with our women, and then eat them.

GALAXY OF TERROR is the silliest of the three and in some ways the most true to the original ALIEN spirit. HORROR PLANET is a far more potent mix, a Sadistic frenzy of murder and chaos with Judy Geeson sweating and screaming and grimacing her way into history. She should have been nominated for an award of some kind, though exactly which variety I am unsure. It is a difficult movie to watch.

Contrastingly, FORBIDDEN WORLD exists as a Sadean fantasy, with the alien more or less leaving it's grubby mitts off the ladies, who both disrobe twice and engage in relations with the manbeef action star lead, and THEN take a shower together. Golly!! One of the interesting aspects of the film is how it repeatedly disrobes it's women and then places them in harm's way, with this grinning, drooling, slimy alien just a tentacle slither away, and as with GALAXY OF TERROR much of what we now know as Hentai Anime and it's unsavory sexual violence was given root in what we see in these films: Slimy, tubular, disgusting aliens having their way with or just simply ripping apart aggressively gorgeous, sexy women in states of undress or nudity.

On that level of thinking, FORBIDDEN WORLD is probably the most exploitative of the trio, using it's subject matter literally where GALAXY OF TERROR and HORROR PLANET both had sub-textural meaning to what was happening on camera. Allan Holzman stuck with the basics: Slimy alien running loose on isolated space station with nubile females showering together while scruffy 2 day growth faced action types search for it with flashlights and ineffective weapons. By keeping the height of his goal post appropriately low, Holzman may have made the superior entertainment of the three, especially if you are fond of naked women and buckets of simmering goo.